Month: November 2021

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday episode when we niche down to a single topic, looking to expand our understanding of one particular technology trend or another. And this week, it was all about
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It’s been almost a year since the EU’s executive announced it would propose rules for political ads transparency in response to concern about online microtargeting and big data techniques making mincemeat of democratic integrity and accountability. Today it’s come out with its proposal. But frankly it doesn’t look like the wait was worth it. The
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Voice AI company SoundHound is set to go public on the Nasdaq via a SPAC transaction at a nearly $2.1 billion valuation in early 2022, blank check company Archimedes and its target announced. The last time you heard SoundHound’s name might have been several years ago when it was considered a lesser-known Shazam competitor. Now
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It’s been well over two years since the UK’s data protection watchdog warned the behavioural advertising industry it’s wildly out of control. The ICO hasn’t done anything to stop the systematic unlawfulness of the tracking and targeting industry abusing Internet users’ personal data to try to manipulate their attention — not in terms of actually
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Nigeria’s informal trade sector, worth over $244 billion, has more than 40 million micro, small and medium businesses. Most of these businesses operated offline until a few years ago when startups brought about digitization by providing infrastructure and a gamut of e-commerce and financial services. One-year-old Sabi — a spinoff from Rensource, an African energy
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Cellular growth medium is a component of cellular agriculture that enables lab-grown meat to be made at a lower cost. However, the traditional ways of making these growth factors, or reagents, are costly themselves, which makes large-scale manufacturing difficult. On average, reports show that lab-grown meat costs about $50, but that new technologies could bring
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As many of the top cryptocurrencies seem to temporarily stabilize near all-time highs, users looking to speculate on tokens that are a bit more volatile are searching across exchanges to find deals. Amsterdam-based startup TabTrader has been capitalizing on this search with a platform that aggregates prices and token availability across dozens of exchanges. While
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Life science company Longevica said Wednesday it is launching an open research tool so scientists and research institutions can access a data set that tracks the effects of more than 1,000 pharmacological compounds for testing drugs. This is the latest effort from the biotechnology company, which is researching mechanisms of healthy aging and life extension.
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Several French ministers have issued a common statement announcing that they have asked the main search engines and mobile app stores operating in France to hide Wish’s website and mobile app altogether. Wish is a popular e-commerce platform that mostly references products from China-based merchants. It doesn’t hold inventory as products are shipped directly from
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Architecture and construction have always been, rather quietly, at the bleeding edge of tech and materials trends. It’s no surprise, then, especially at a renowned technical university like ETH Zurich, to find a project utilizing AI and robotics in a new approach to these arts. The automated design and construction they are experimenting with show
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Boyd Davis Contributor Boyd Davis is the CEO and co-founder of Compright, a cloud-based compensation planning tool. Previously, Boyd helped organizations deploy solutions that leveraged data and AI. The Great Resignation is among the most significant events in recent U.S. history. We are seeing a post-COVID-19 generation refusing to work under the same conditions as
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“Buy now, pay later” company Afterpay announced Wednesday that it was going after the $1.5 trillion global subscription payments market by offering to its U.S. customers payment installments for subscriptions, like gym memberships, entertainment subscriptions and online services. The service will launch in both the U.S. and Australia beginning early in 2022 and will be
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Last year, fintech API infrastructure players came into the African tech scene, ushering in Plaid-like services to businesses and developers. And the attention on these companies, particularly from venture capitalists, spiralled into this year, with each significant player raising large seed to Series A rounds. OnePipe, a fintech API company with a different play from
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